US rotary rig count down by three to 488

Kristen Nelson

Petroleum News

The Baker Hughes U.S. rotary drilling rig count was at 488 the week ending July 30, down by three from the previous week’s count of 491 and up by 237 from 251 a year ago.

When the count bottomed out at 244 in mid-August last year, it was not just the low for 2020, but the lowest the count has been since the Houston based oilfield services company began issuing weekly U.S. numbers in 1944.

Prior to 2020, the low was 404 rigs in May 2016. The count peaked at 4,530 in 1981.

The count was in the low 790s at the beginning of 2020, where it remained through mid-March, when it began to fall, dropping below what had been the historic low in early May with a count of 374 and continuing to drop through the third week of August when it gained back 10 rigs.

The July 30 count includes 385 rigs targeting oil, down by two from the previous week and up 205 from 180 a year ago, 103 rigs targeting gas, down by one from the previous week and up by 34 from 69 a year ago, and no miscellaneous rigs, unchanged from the previous week and down by two from a year ago.

Twenty-nine of the rigs reported July 30 were drilling directional wells, 442 were drilling horizontal wells and 17 were drilling vertical wells.

Alaska rig count unchanged

North Dakota (19), Ohio (11) and Pennsylvania (19) were each up by a single rig.

Louisiana (48) was down by four rigs; Utah (10) was down by two rigs; Colorado (11) and New Mexico (74) were each down by a single rig.

Rig counts in all other states were unchanged from the previous week: Alaska (5), California (6), Oklahoma (30), West Virginia (10) and Wyoming (13).

Baker Hughes shows Alaska with five rigs active July 30, unchanged from the previous week and up two from a year ago, when the state’s count stood at three.

The rig count in the Permian, the most active basin in the country, was up by one from the previous week at 243 and up by 119 from a count of 124 a year ago.

- KRISTEN NELSON